Purple Flower Birthday Card

In this month of many birthdays, I am on a birthday card kick! This one is for my friend Becky, who gave me a beautiful stamp with the flower in the bottle. It’s a wood stamp from Inkadinkado, Vintage Bottle Flower.

A purple flower for a June birthday.

As always when I watercolor, I stamped my image in waterproof Versafine Black Onyx ink. Her favorite color is purple so I colored the flower a vibrant purple using my Inktense pencil and a water brush on watercolor paper. I also used some pink to add depth to the flower. I colored the stems and leaves with various shades of green and the bottle with light blue tones. I used a gray tint to add shadow to the bottom and right side of the bottle. I added a tiny bit of glimmer to the center of the flower with my stardust pen from Sakura.

The image was looking a little stark, so I took my ink blending tool from Ranger and added Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Peeled Paint to the edges for some green shading.

I didn’t have a particular design in mind, but once I started playing with some paper swatches, I decided to try a picture frame effect. Though the colors don’t match perfectly, I like the complementary tones in the 4.5″ x 6.5″ paper pad from the Paper Studio’s So-So-Sweet line (from Hobby Lobby). I found that I liked having two solid colors and two patterned papers, all in different widths.

The final touch was the birthday sentiment from Fiskars and a few clear rhinestones scattered here and there.